9. An "Early Harappan" polychrome pot with fish design from Nal, South Baluchistan If the 'fish' pictograms of the Indus script generally meant 'star', why was the meaning 'star' not expressed directly with a 'star' pictogram as in the ancient Near East? Why did the Harappans in a more complicated way use a 'fish' pictogram and the rebus principle? One answer could be t… >

13. Systematic and interlocking interpretations of Harappan pictograms. One further way to check the correctness of the above proposed interpretation of the 'fish' pictograms is to study Indus signs that occur next to the 'fish' pictograms. The task is to test whether any of these signs can be interpreted by applying the same methods and hypotheses, and to see if somethin… >

14. An Indus Seal from Mohenjo-daro Another diacritic sign is drawn either directly or obliquely across the body of the 'fish' pictogram (Fig. 14, 13c). It could denote 'halving' or 'dividing into two parts': the corresponding Proto-Dravidian root, *pacu , is homophonous with Proto-Dravidian *pacu 'green'. The resulting compound, * pacu-meen 'halved fish' & 'green star', … >

The pictogram just mentioned has several variant forms in the Indus texts (Fig. 16, 17). Their comparison with the motifs of Early Harappan painted pottery (Fig. 7) suggests that this pictogram represents the large Indian fig tree, Ficus Indica. Except when combined with another sign (depicting the 'crab'), which is placed inside it omitting the central "branch" (Fig. 15)… >

20. (Right) The six or seven ladies (the Pleiades?) on an Indus seal In the Indus script, numerals are marked by repeating a short vertical stroke the required number of times. The pictograms of 'six' (six short strokes divided to two lines) and (on its left side) 'fish' together form a syntactic unit (Fig. 13f). It corresponds to the compound aru-meen 'six-star' occurring… >

The Indus script represents logo-syllabic writing. This means that it does not constitute such a closed system of single-valued graphemes as the syllabic and alphabetic scripts, which could be cracked as wholes. Rather, individual signs may be interpreted one by one, and many of the graphemes are likely to remain eternal mysteries. The interpretations presented above, few i… >

Notes 1. This paper is a revised English version of Parpola: 1985 and essentially a summary of earlier published original work. Detailed documentation, which the reader can find elsewhere (see especially Parpola: 1975, 1984 and 1986), is omitted here. 2. For the term 'icon', see Lyons: 1977, 102-105. 3. Cf. Pfeiffer: 1972, nos. 308 and 725. This root may be related to… >

1. Meeting the Challenge of the Indus Script In 1920, excavations at Harappa brought to light the ruins of a large brick-laid city, and soon a whole unknown civilization was uncovered in and around the Indus valley (Figure 1). 1 The Indus civilization, now dated to c. 2600-1800 B.C., collapsed some 500 years before the composition of most of the hymns collected in the Rgved… >